A Search Engine Learning Game
Alfred Thompson
Internet search engines. Students are particularly bad at it. You would be
amazed at what they can't find. Recently I found out about a game called Page
Hunt (http://pagehunt.msrlivelabs-int.com/). I’d like to get a lot of
students to play it myself. They may find out they are not as swift at
searches as they think but more importantly they may get better at it. Either
that or they may make search better by supplying data to the research project
that Page Hunt is part of.
A brief blurb about the game:
This game is like search in reverse: you're shown a web page, which you
have to ‘hunt down' using queries sent to Live Search.
When you see the web page, think of a set of terms that would return this
page.
You type these words into a search box. Page Hunt shows the top 5 results
for this query from Microsoft’s Live Search.
You get points if the web page you're 'hunting' is one of these top 5 result
pages: 100 points if it's at position 1, 90 points at position 2 etc. If you
don’t get it right, change the query and try hunting again. If you get it
right, you advance to the next page.
Occasionally, you'll see very frequent queries listed for a page. If you
don't use these queries to hunt these pages, you'll get a 50% bonus when you
crack that page. And sometimes, just for fun, we give you other bonuses!
If you move the mouse away from the search box, it becomes slightly
transparent, so you can see the page better. You can also move the box around
if you like. If you get stuck on a page, you can click on the Skip button to
go to the next web page, with no penalty in your score. If you encounter a
page which does not render properly, or is bad in any way, click on the Bad
Page button to flag it.
Each session of the game is 3 minutes long. At the end of a session, you get
your session score. At the end of a session, you can review each page, the
searches you tried and the results you got from Live Search.
The game uses Silverlight, so you may be prompted to load Silverlight when
you first run it.
Page Hunt (http://pagehunt.msrlivelabs-int.com/) is actually part of a
research project that is trying to improve online search by looking at how
people actually use search. How metadata is used and other attributes of both
web pages and the way people form queries. So if you think online search
could be better playing this game may help improve things. And honestly I
find it fun trying to find out how many pages I can “find” in the 3 minute
time period.